I recently read this article, The 411 on mobile snap technology, about a mobile phone technology and it made me think about how we could apply this to health care.

I couldn't think of anything that would fit in with what patients would naturally use.

But we are working on a mobile site that will have scaled down/phone optimized applications that make sense to use on a phone.  We will not be putting the entire eCommunity.com site on this mobile site because it won't all work effectively on a small screen with a slower bandwidth.

Which is how our team operates.  Instead of rushing to do something cool, we make the technology fit a need to process.  We make the new application fit in our existing structure and make sure it is user friendly.

A good example is our News section on eCommunity.com.  We have news stories that have an RSS feed linked to them all and the monthly news stories also have a podcast feed.  In addition to offering the podcast, we allow the user to listen to an individual story without subscribing to the podcast.

All made as user friendly as possible with explanations of what a RSS feed is.

We also use Feedburner to make the RSS feeds as easy as possible to use for users on any browser.

We added a Google Maps mash-up to our Find a Doctor application because it made sense to do so.

These are all intelligent uses of new technology that are used to benefit the application they are added to.  They were no implemented just because it’s cool and want to build something with it.  Those types of applications will disappear in a few years leaving only the truly useful ones.  Just like what happened with the tech bubble in the 90's.  The good stuff remained and the bad ideas failed.